Power Girl #1Review

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A disappointing debut for Superman's Earth 2 cousin.

By Dan Phillips

Ideally, comics are supposed to include a perfect synergy between words and images. Certain creative teams can get away with allowing the words to do the heavy lifting in some places and the images to handle the storytelling in others, but for the most part there should be a happy marriage between the two main components of the form. Power Girl #1 is one of those comics where the words and images work so horribly together, you can hardly refer to the dynamic between the two as a dysfunctional relationship, much less a happy marriage. The book is so awfully over-written, it's difficult to even enjoy the gorgeous artwork of Amanda Conner.

Before I go any further, I should point out that Conner is without a doubt one of the true artistic stars in DC's ranks, and I'll never quite understand why they've yet to put her on an A-list book with an A-list writer. Instead, she gets projects like Terra and Power Girl, where she's forced to do her best with an underdeveloped character and lackluster story. As far as stars go, Power Girl is far richer than the recently introduced Terra, but in the hands of writers Palmiotti and Gray, she's little more than a headstrong heroine who is unsure of her place on this Earth. But I digress…

What's most notable about Power Girl #1 is that nearly every singe panel present is strangled by big chunks of textboxes detailing the sort of unnecessary narration where a character thinks about punching something right as he or she is about to punch something. It's the worst sort of comic book storytelling, where the writer feels the need to lay down an exposition-laden voice-over caption just so he has something to write on each page.

In another example of over-scripting the comic to death, Palmiotti and Gray also take time off from stepping on Conner's action scenes to flashback to a longwinded segment in which Karen reopens her tech corporation, Starrware Labs. It's here that the little life Conner is able to infuse in the comic despite Gray and Palmiotti's best efforts is sucked dry, and the issue turns into an ugly, boring and at times unreadable collage of large dialogue balloons and captions. There's an old Stan Lee adage that says no given comic book caption or balloon should contain more than twenty-seven words, and while certain writers have successfully stepped beyond those parameters, Palmiotti and Gray definitely do not pull it off.

Power Girl #1 could have been a fun, energetic comic about a gorgeous superhero trying to stop an evil gorilla from destroying Manhattan. If only the issue's writers were wise enough to get out of the damn way…